Another View: Sack health-care law, and start fresh

The latest evidence that the Affordable Care Act is a deeply flawed law is yet another unilateral decision by the Obama administration to make a change to the law in reaction to concerns raised by a group affected by it. This time, President Barack Obama again responded to concerns from businesses that say they are unable to meet the employer mandate that is a key part of the ACA.

In response, Obama again delayed the law's employer mandate that requires companies to provide affordable health insurance to employees or face steep fines. This, the second delay in the employer mandate, grants a reprieve until 2016 for employers with between 50 and 99 full-time workers.

Also under the new rules, companies with 100 or more workers will need only to offer affordable coverage to 70 percent of full-time workers in 2015, and 95 percent beginning in 2016. The changes also state that the mandate doesn't apply to people such as volunteer firefighters and seasonal employees. The Treasury Department cautioned in introducing the changes that it reserves the right to extend the changes beyond the dates mentioned.

The changes are just the latest in a litany of alterations to the law that include the first delay in the employer mandate, a change that allowed insurers to extend some policies that had been canceled at the start of the year because they didn't meet the law's minimum requirements.

The latest change continues a botched roll-out of the ACA that was highlighted by a website that didn't work properly for weeks and limited early enrollments.

Obama's unilateral changes run counter to the president's constitutional authority; only Congress should have the authority to make such substantive changes to a law once it has been passed. Problem is, Congress is bitterly divided between Democrats who support Obama and Republicans who are glad to see the health-care mandate put off indefinitely if the entire law cannot be scrapped.

Here are some very troubling problems with Obama continually moving the goalposts on the ACA.

First, individuals continue to be subject to a mandate to buy health insurance and face a fine if they do not comply. With no employer mandate, the individual mandate should be scrapped, too.

Second, those whose employers do not provide an affordable health plan need to seek it in the private market or on the health-care exchanges, but if they earn more than four times the poverty level, they get no federal subsidies to offset the significant costs of health insurance.

Third, the fines that employers were supposed to face for ignoring the law were supposed to help offset the costs of Obamacare, including subsidies and the Medicaid expansion that is its most laudable feature.

The latest change also continues a trend of selective implementation of a law that was supposed to ensure that more Americans had affordable health care available to them and that most Americans would see a decline in health insurance costs.

The best course would be for the administration to acknowledge that this is deeply flawed legislation and put the entire law on hold while Congress works in a bipartisan fashion to craft a workable health-care law.

The Greenville (S.C.) News

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Another View: Sack health-care law, and start fresh

The latest evidence that the Affordable Care Act is a deeply flawed law is yet another unilateral decision by the Obama administration to make a change to the law in reaction to concerns raised by a